In this paper we analyze the factors that affect the choice of land tenure contracts in the semi arid tropics of India. We develop a dynamic principal-agent model with one-sided private information to explain the co-existence of wage, rent and share-cropping contracts. We generate empirically...

Increasing the share of women in politics is regularly promoted as a means of reducing corruption. In this paper, we look for evidence of a gender gap in dishonesty among elected representatives, as well as how this changes with time in office. Based on a sample of 356 inexperienced and...

Who gets elected to political office? The negative selection hypothesis posits that the inherently dishonest run for office, expecting to earn political rent. Alternatively, the positive selection hypothesis suggests that individuals join politics to make a difference. Developing country...

Two issues in land tenure contracts in agriculture that have vexed economists are (1) the appearance and co-existence of multiple contracts, often in adjoining plots of land and (2) the choice of a share-cropping contract because a share contract being analogous to a proportional tax, is...

We use the investment game introduced by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995) to explore gender differences in trust and reciprocity. In doing so we replicate and extend the results first reported by Croson and Buchan (1999). We find that men exhibit greater trust than women do while women show much...

We use a two-person extensive form bargaining game to examine individuals? trusting and reciprocal behavior and how those relate to their scores on a trust survey. In keeping with prior research, we find that the ?self-interested? outcome is rejected by a majority of individuals. People who...

We adopt an inter-generational approach to the public goods game where at the end of each session subjects are allowed to leave advice for the succeeding generation via free form messages. We find that a process of social learning via passing advice from one generation to the next helps increase...

We study a public goods game where subjects get feedback either continually or intermittently. We find that the intermittent feedback helps to mitigate problems of free riding because subjects in this treatment focus more on a string of choices rather than deciding on a case by case basis as in...

We explore how subjects with heterogeneous beliefs respond to a surprise restart in a linear public goods game played for 20 rounds using either a "partners" or a "strangers" protocol. There are two restarts: one prior to Round 11 and another prior to Round 16. We elicit subject beliefs at the...